Generation Ships

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Of course. I just meant that today's westerner can have foods from all over the globe nearly 365 days a year. Never eating another banana, or favorite fish would become the go to complaint from grumpy guses even if they can have 5000 styles of chicken and tuna. :)

While I would vaguely dislike the idea of not being able to eat a whatever ever again there are a lot of foods that I could never have access to again and not really notice. Even better they will probably carry the genetic information for them along so if I really want to have one I could grow it. Of course realistically everyone is going to have to deal with at least some reduction in easy access to one of the foods they like. Plus there are all kinds of interesting new things you can do with foods that hasn't been explored yet. Also having things to grumble about might be good for a society.

Originally Posted by nondescript handle

A generation ship will have an accessibility of mission critical equipment more like a cruise ship (there are children on board after all) than a warship (and there is sanctioned alcohol consumption on present day warships, at least those under German flag).

So I really can't see the drunkenly-pressed-the-"self destruct"-instead-of-the-"flush toilet"-button scenario.

A generation ship will mostly have an accessibility of mission equipment like a generation ship. I at least think it's important for the whole population to be engaged in maintenance &c if only for mental well being.

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

TL8 can't make a self-contained human-suitable biosphere that will last more than a few years if that. The canonical GURPS generation ship treatment is in BIOTECH for 4/e.

Meh. I happen to disagree but it's not really relevant. Like I said suppose whatever TL you find necessary. Besides that... Generation ships are mentioned in Space and Ultra-Tech mentions regenerative life and there is Spaceships of course but where (aside from Draconis.) are generation ships mentioned in Bio-Tech?

Originally Posted by malloyd

This pretty much needs to be true for everything. Trying to run a society as a total command economy where everything has to be perfectly right all the time or we all die is not going to work for years, let alone generations. You absolutely need some margin in everything or you are going to have a disaster. At absolute minimum, you need to set things up so something going wrong only means some of us die, and we have redundant people we can afford that.

Well you want some margin for the things that lead to collapse and that can be achieved through stored supplies rather than overproduction. It makes sense to overproduce food since it helps the variety, can be used in things like alcohol, and is easily convertible to more food. In general though yeah it's important for there to be some slack.

[Danukian]

Originally Posted by Sindri

While I would vaguely dislike the idea of not being able to eat a whatever ever again there are a lot of foods that I could never have access to again and not really notice.

Maybe you wouldn't notice, but in the Navy, some people start to gripe after 2 days, almost everyone has a strong craving after 6 months. I'm picturing some of the biggest complainers I knew after 20 years....

Originally Posted by Gold & Appel Inc

Booze: If this bird is really TL8 (suspending disbelief for the sake of discussion), it's going to be pretty fragile to careless mishaps and everybody needs to be on their game 24/7. If I was writing the rules, they'd read like: "Possession gets you days in solitary equal to all cumulative offenses, per offense. Building and operating a still (without a permit for industrial uses) gets you spaced. No judge. No trial. Spaced. Any questions?"

Most navies other than US and Muslim nations have alcohol rations, and things have been going reasonably for the past 4 centuries. Knowing the desperate ingenuity of people who are prohibited from drinking for 2 weeks, a "dry" generational ship is going to have an impossible task of hunting down blige-wine operations - which only require water, sugar, yeast, and a sealed container - not to mention if a guy from engineering cooperates with a guy from hydroponics and food resources! Heck, if there is no legal stimulants, it'll only be a matter of time before a generation of over-educated, under-thrilled deviants start cooking up nasty chemical highs as a replacement. If this ship can handle 30 children running amok, I'm sure it's study enough for Crewman Jones to have 2 beers a days.


Back to the OP: I think you will need a higher than average percentage of capable teachers and maintenance personal, able to keep a ship functional as well as train the next generations of doctors, engineers, crewman, etc.

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by Danukian

Maybe you wouldn't notice, but in the Navy, some people start to gripe after 2 days, almost everyone has a strong craving after 6 months. I'm picturing some of the biggest complainers I knew after 20 years....



Most navies other than US and Muslim nations have alcohol rations, and things have been going reasonably for the past 4 centuries. Knowing the desperate ingenuity of people who are prohibited from drinking for 2 weeks, a "dry" generational ship is going to have an impossible task of hunting down blige-wine operations - which only require water, sugar, yeast, and a sealed container - not to mention if a guy from engineering cooperates with a guy from hydroponics and food resources! Heck, if there is no legal stimulants, it'll only be a matter of time before a generation of over-educated, under-thrilled deviants start cooking up nasty chemical highs as a replacement. If this ship can handle 30 children running amok, I'm sure it's study enough for Crewman Jones to have 2 beers a days.


Back to the OP: I think you will need a higher than average percentage of capable teachers and maintenance personal, able to keep a ship functional as well as train the next generations of doctors, engineers, crewman, etc.

The foods in questions that I wouldn't notice was things I haven't even heard of or have no desire to eat. There are a lot of foods out there thus there are a lot of weird vegetables I've seen once and never had.

I think you could definitely keep the first generation dry the question is whether it's a good idea and if it's worth the cost in narrowing eligible people.

Yeah the teaching of the next generation is going to have to be rather dependable.

[Flyndaran]

"I'm sorry Billy but your test scores were too high to be a game designing hobo from cargo bay 3. You're just going to have be an electrical engineer."

[Gold & Appel Inc]

Originally Posted by Sindri

Yeah and selecting for people who can do something like roleplaying for decades is useful but I think that it would make sense for there to be backups in case the next generations diverge significantly and produce a lot of people who just aren't satisfied if they don't feel they are making a difference or something.

Meh, I was talking about hobbies there. They can make a difference at their job, and can learn a second job to make a difference at in their spare time if literally nothing else amuses them.

Originally Posted by Sindri

Well there is probably a necessary amount of food diversity but I meant that only producing enough food to feed everyone is problematic if something goes wrong and reduces the food production or the population increases or something. It makes sense to be paranoid when designing a generation ship.

If we're so paranoid, why are we converting the surplus to recreational pharmaceuticals instead of preserving it somehow, in case the next hydroponic crop fails or something?

[Astromancer]

Some observations.

First, a viable generation starship would need to be large. If not quite on the same level as RED DWARF, not a great deal smaller. Why? Population.

In order to have the kind of stablity needed for a interstellar settlement/colony, you need at least a few hundred thousand to a million people. That requiers a big ship.

Second, a group of at least several hundred thousand people will be diverse and see the needs of society in different ways. Certainly some people would never be allowed to join the crew. Religous extremists probably wouldn't want to leave the solar system, but they'd be a burden on the ship anyway, and rejected. Stalinists, Fascists, and other groups favoring violence and tyranny are useless too. Similarly, Liberterians, though rarely violent, wouldn't be suited to the necessary rules and required comformity of shipboard life. Still, there would be cultural and social diversity in the group. This would be both a source of conflict and stablity.

Third, to survive interstellar space in a fragile bubble of technology a society would require both an awareness of all problems in the ship's society/culture and a society/culture composed of teams of individuals. Thus an Open Society is required and a highly egalitarian one too. And as talent can come from anywhere, and this society would need to develope all of its talents to survive, a society that educated all of its members to the limits of their abilities.

[Danukian]

Originally Posted by Sindri

The foods in questions that I wouldn't notice was things I haven't even heard of or have no desire to eat. There are a lot of foods out there thus there are a lot of weird vegetables I've seen once and never had.

Again, unless your entire crew has been recruited from the same isolated mono-ethnic town, there are going to be some 1st-genners missing something...

I think you could definitely keep the first generation dry the question is whether it's a good idea and if it's worth the cost in narrowing eligible people.

It's 100% possible to keep the 1st gen dry - recruit people that don't drink is the simplest! I'm sure by Gen 3, archaic entertainment your granddad loved just isn't going to cut it for a bunch of pent up teens that have never seen outside the skin of a ship...

[nondescript handle]

Originally Posted by Sindri

[...] I at least think it's important for the whole population to be engaged in maintenance &c if only for mental well being. [...]

I don't know how broadly you define "maintenance," but we're talking about less then a million people who'll have to maintain an entire industrial infrastructure on their own.

Go to your nearest city under 1 million pop and imagine they'll have to build everything themselves, provide every service themselves, and train all the people to do so themselves.
From the MRI in the hospital to the training of certified accountants, everything.

I'm not so sure they have enough capacity to include everyone in maintenance for psychological reasons.

But that's besides my point: Gold & Appel Inc spoke about catastrophes "by not hitting the wrong button during off hours."
And I have a really, really hard time imagining something so incredibly huge like a generational vessel where you could accidentally hit a button with catastrophic consequences, while in the residential and recreational parts of that ship.

Even if everyone is handling sludge in environmental for their mental well being, nobody will have the main environmental controls by his/her bunk close to the switches for the overhead. Not even submarines are build like that.

[Frost]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

First, a viable generation starship would need to be large. If not quite on the same level as RED DWARF, not a great deal smaller. Why? Population.

In order to have the kind of stablity needed for a interstellar settlement/colony, you need at least a few hundred thousand to a million people. That requiers a big ship.

While I would suspect that you might, given sufficent computer support and suitible tools, be able to get by with a far smaller population at least during the flight I tend to agree that a colony will almost certainly consist of one or more very large vessels carying significant numbers of people.

In and of its self this is going to place a significant limit on how effectively a population can be monitored. With this in mind I suspect that many of the more agressively represive systems of administration won't actualy work.

Originally Posted by Astromancer

...an Open Society is required and a highly egalitarian one too. And as talent can come from anywhere, and this society would need to develope all of its talents to survive, a society that educated all of its members to the limits of their abilities.

Again I tend to agree, this sort of structure is probably the best bet for any sort of long term coxeistence. It neatly avoids (or at least mitigates) the difficulties in handovers of power and authority between generations that may well occur under an authoritarian structure.

I would also have to disagree fairly loudly with Flyndaran, at the end of the day in the normal course of opperations the one thing generation ships do have is time to make decisions so slow decision making is a non-issue. Democratic structures are not incompatible with either restrictions upon either reckless or perverse decisions or robust contingency plans.

[Lamech]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

TL8 can't make a self-contained human-suitable biosphere that will last more than a few years if that. The canonical GURPS generation ship treatment is in BIOTECH for 4/e.

Spaceships disagrees with you. You can make a generation ship starting at... TL 7. That said spaceships is horribly optimistic about everything. However nothing really prevents a generation ship at TL 7 according to spaceships.